If you were a monk living in the Selime Monastery, this is the lovely view you would have from your room ... of the volcano. Maybe to remind you of the fire and brimstone that awaits you in the next world if you don't behave yourself in this one? The volcano is the reason this room is carved from the rock, and why there are so many cave houses in Cappadocia. This volcano, and the two others in the neighbourhood, have over time covered the whole area in a volcanic rock called tuff, which is quite soft as rock goes. From about the 5th century AD the area became popular with early Christians who were hiding from the Romans and later from the Turks, and they accommodated themselves by carving dwellings out of the tuff. This entire monastery complex is carved from the rock, with chapels, sleeping rooms, store rooms and stables, and dates from about the 13th century. There are several other churches nearby, also carved from the rock, and some are still covered in beautiful wall paintings dating back many centuries. Nearby there is even an underground city carved from the rock, which descends 11 stories and 85 metres underground. The whole Cappadocian region has long been distinctive for its cave dwellings and many are still in use even today. It's an amazing place to visit, and totally weird and alien.

Before and After

This is my first attempt at manual HDR, and I'm quite pleased with the results. I used the usual -2, 0 and +2 exposure bracketing and hand held the shots. When it came to tone mapping, I abandoned my usual Photomatix and used the luminance mask technique of Tony Kuyper to manually blend my three shots. This let me carefully select which parts of each exposure to use, and allowed me to keep the HDR look quite subtle. The down side is that it took many more hours to produce the final result, and the Photoshop file was approaching a gig in size at some points. Even with 4 gigs of RAM my iMac turned into iMolasses. I'm sure more practice will speed the workflow up considerably though.

The before and after shots show the 0 exposure compensation shot on the left, and the hand blended HDR on the right. Next time I will post a before and after with the Photomatix version of this image, and chat about how the techniques differ.